Jan 27 2012
Leave a comment
Blogroll, Friday Morning Dump

The Great Friday Hangover Brain Dump

A forum to flush out the week’s ideas after a strong cup of coffee…

There’s pretty much just one person who gives a flying fuck whether Messi is better than Pele. Well, maybe two. The fact remains Pele is having an argument with himself. I watch as many Barca games as I can, and not once have I compared Messi to Pele. Somewhat because they are two different players in two different eras against different sets of competition, but mostly because I don’t care. (And, if Messi is taken at his word, he doesn’t care either: “I never…compared myself with another player.”) Maybe I’m too young, or I don’t respect the legends of the game, but every time Pele heckles other players I enjoy him less. One imagines Pele sitting at home like the 1972 Dolphins, popping a bottle of Korbel after every World Cup game in which Messi goes scoreless. Instead of the happy, gracious World Ambassador of Soccer he appears to be in photos, every time Pele opens his mouth about “greatness” he sounds old, bitter, and impossibly afraid to be swept out of the game’s consciousness. Actually it sounds pretty familiar.

I found myself nodding along vigorously to Matt Hinton’s critique of the Super Bowl-bound New York Giants and why playoffs aren’t always a perfect. He also right to point out that any feasible college football playoff would keep mediocre teams like the Giants out entirely. I would differ with his criticism of the “regular season is a playoff” and “every game counts” mantras in the college game. Of course those assertions are not absolutely true, but among American sports it is more true in college football than anywhere else. The perfect, every game counts regular season? English Premiere League, La Liga, etc. There every game is assigned points based on performance (win, lose, draw) and the team with the most points after the regular season wins. Obviously I’m not arguing this model for college or pro football. But on the regular season spectrum, at least college football is further to the meaningful end than any other American sport. (Sorry, NASCAR.)

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE read Gary Smith’s stunning piece on Gareth “Alf” Thomas, the Welsh rugby star who remains the most famous openly gay male athlete still playing. It is alternately endearing, heart-breaking, soul-crushing, and hopeful. Although it was cruel for Smith to open with a now-content Thomas seemingly surprised that no American athlete had come out yet, and then drag us through the years emotional and physical pain Thomas suffered before making his decision, the reaction from fellow players and fans was heartening. I would like to believe America is ready to embrace a gay athlete the same way, only I wish that athlete’s path to stardom and openness is less damaging in its course.

UPDATE: My god, I’m so sorry I forgot to include this.

Happy Weekend, Y’all.

Jan 25 2012
Leave a comment
Drinking Man's Thinking Guide

The Drinking Man’s Guide To Thinking

All these fancypants mens magazines run segments trying teach impressionable boys who’ve yet to make a decision on their own how to drink more thoughtfully/ responsibly/ fashionably/ manlyly. Instead of that, every St. Thursday’s Eve we’re gonna learn y’all drunkards how to think. Here we go…

Alrighty, it’s time to get a read that truly brings out the vanilla and dried cherry notes in your cab franc. BOOM: This Is Not a Pipe.

Michel Foucault‘s meditation on Rene Magritte‘s meditation on artistic mediation is a cracking little mind bender. Take this line with a healthy gulp from your Target Wine Cube: “About even this ambiguity, however, I am ambiguous.” You see, it’s absolutely true that what you’re looking at is, in fact, not a pipe. Also, the written word “this” is not a pipe. Even “pipe” is not a pipe, nor is it even “pipe.” Now go ahead and open the spigot on that warming chianti and let the impossibility of knowledge wash over you:

What misleads us is the inevitability of connecting the text to the drawing (as the demonstrative pronoun, the meaning of the word pipe, and the likeliness of the image all invite us to do here) – and the impossibility of defining perspective that would let us say that the assertion is true, false, or contradictory.

There you have it: there is no truth, especially in art. Also, the statement “there is no truth..” is not true. We clear?

BONUS DRINKING: If you like a good roadie, you might like these.

BONUS THINKING: Apparently Maurice Sendak shares my views on electronic books and readers. I’ll link the video when it hits the interwebs, but to paraphrase: ”…maybe it’s the future, but I’ll be dead so I DON’T GIVE A FUCK!”

Jan 24 2012
Leave a comment
Meaty Tackles, The Effete Kind of Football

The Hard and Soft of English Soccer

I own the video to the right.  At the apex of my soccer playing career, I considered myself a hard defender, so far as one playing D-III soccer for a small private school in upstate New York can be “hard.” I was a marking back with decent speed, good on-the-ball defending skills, and sub-par distribution. I thought I was a good tackler; I enjoyed “getting stuck in.” I also broke my own tibia twice, in the same spot, on sliding tackles and never thought twice about altering my playing style. (Actually, I remember later targeting for retribution the player who I first broke my leg against.)

I am a changed man. I didn’t realize just how changed until listening to the recent Men in Blazers podcast discussing the explosion of straight red cards in the Premiere League. Michael Davies and Roger Bennett were bemoaning Vincent Kompany’s sending off against Manchester United specifically, and the changes in English football generally. Former English national player and ESPN analyst Steve McManaman did his best not to use the word “soft.”

Initially, I heard myself disagreeing with the hosts. “I watch soccer to see beautiful and spectacular feats of physical impossibility,” I thought, “and the smashed ankles of the most skilled playmakers decreases my chances of seeing that.” Therefore I nod along when Grant Wahl wonders how long Lionel Messi can withstand defenders’ assaults. I enjoy watching Barcelona play, and would like to continue that enjoyment. Then, as I heard McManaman saying, to paraphrase, “we like our tackles and the physical play,” I realized that my current taste in soccer aesthetics wasn’t always the case. After all, I own that video – and it’s the only soccer video I own. I dished out hard tackles and injury. And, on several occasions, I loudly argued that basketball was not a contact sport, while soccer was. Now I began to think of all the pickup games I’ve played since I graduated college. In 10 years I couldn’t remember one hard, sliding tackle, or even the last time I wanted commit one. In fact, the player I was is the same player I now scream at on the US National Team – “Why can’t we have someone who knows how to play out of the back, instead of hoofing it up top all the time?” I have to admit that, if I ever was “hard,” I am now “soft.” (Enjoy chuckling to any euphemistic jokes you can make.)

Similar hand-wringing from both the “protect the players” and “protect the sport” sides is occurring in American football and hockey circles. Concussions vs. Contact. Fights vs. Gameflow. I don’t know when exactly my tastes changed. But I’ve generally found myself celebrating international and Olympic hockey for it’s lack of senseless pugilistics and wondering if football is an inherently flawed sport that just can’t leave a former player with his full compliment of cognitive abilities. I can’t remember when I last watched “Soccer’s Hard Men.” Perhaps this evening I’ll go home, pop it in my dusty VCR and press play. I don’t know if I’ll begin to miss those meaty tackles of yesteryear, especially considering I had forgotten how much they defined my formal playing days. But it might be nice to see Vinnie Jones, squeezing a handful of Paul Gascoigne, and wonder if it’s impossible to have it both ways.

Jan 20 2012
Leave a comment
Blogroll, Friday Morning Dump

The Great Friday Hangover Brain Dump

A forum to flush out the week’s ideas after a strong cup of coffee…

Of course I meant my Google Goggles post to be Run of Playish, but this section of Brain Phillips’s recent Grantland piece is eerie:

Soccer gives players more chaos to contend with than any other major sport.4 So there’s something uniquely thrilling about the moments when they manage to impose their own order on it.

And his footnote: “4. The classic American sports control the danger of appearing random in all kinds of ways — baseball constantly resets to the same starting position, football does the same while adding 29,384 rules about who can and can’t do what on which plays, basketball breaks itself into discrete timed segments, etc.”

And me:

…football’s comfort comes from it’s familiarity and predictability. And soccer’s thrill comes from its chaos…soccer seems to me a perfect form of chaos. Chaos confined to about an acre of grass, three or four crucial laws, and the ever-malleable limits of human physiology and imagination.

I’m going to go ahead and flatter myself by thinking we both watch the game the same way.

Does the recruiting season make you feel dirty? Bathe in Spencer Hall’s recruiting Layperson’s Primer and Glossary. A mild astringent that will cleanse the Tom Luginbill away.

My spirit animal was on Archer last night, and it was even better than I thought it’d be.

Happy Weekend, Y’all. 

Jan 19 2012
Leave a comment
Uncategorized

POSTSCRIPT: Soccer, Football, and Google Goggles

So not too long ago I was bemoaning new technology, Andy Roonying my way through this new-fangled imagination-killer called Google Goggles. Around the time I was finishing that #firstworldproblems post, I stumbled on another Wikipedia article, this one describing Technological Singularity. (Wikipedia being the lazy man’s way to erudition.) Now, I recognize the apparent hypocrisy of arguing against the new Google technology as making all things knowable, then employing a technological term, the APEX of technology at that, to describe the unknowable. But such is the power of Barcelona – taking the knowable (tiki taka) so far as to become unknowable. So in honor of their Copa del Rey victory yesterday over Real Madrid, here goes (quotes from the article, italics from me, post-quote analysis from my id):

Many of the most recognized writers on the singularity… define the concept in terms of the technological creation of superintelligence, and argue that it is difficult or impossible for present-day humans to predict what a post-singularity world would be like, due to the difficulty of imagining the intentions and capabilities of superintelligent entities.

Barcelona has refined their tactics under Pep Guardiola to become impossible to predict in two ways. First, the usual movement from defensive flank, through Xavi and Busquets in the middle, and back out to Messi, Sanchez, and Alvez (and previously Villa) on the offensive flanks forms a sort of figure-eight through the pitch. While this is fairly predictable, where the actual attacking move will come from, and who and when, is impossible to know, perhaps even by Barca’s own players. This is what makes them so lethal. The ball follows and follows this known pattern, then in a flash, it shifts somewhere incomprehensible. See Eric Abidal’s goal from yesterday as an example. The second way Barca is unpredictable is when they don’t follow the aforementioned movement at all. Yesterday saw them attack more directly through Fabregas, who was moved farther forward on the pitch. While Real tried to press high with midfield cloggers Pepe and Alonso, Fabregas constantly pulled them back, opening up direct lanes to Sanchez.

The term “technological singularity” was originally coined by Vinge, who made an analogy between the breakdown in our ability to predict what would happen after the development of superintelligence and the breakdown of the predictive ability of modern physics at the space-time singularity beyond the event horizon of a black hole.

Yes, describing Barcelona as a “superintelligence” is going to get me all kinds of well-deserved critiques. But the analogy holds – as their players have spent so much time drilling in their unique style and tactical movement, particular pieces become ingrained and almost hyper-predictable. But then the style moves further, where players are moving so quickly and subconsciously that they themselves may not realize what they are about to do or where they will go with the ball before it happens. The way Iniesta moves around defenders doesn’t dusplay so much well-planned maneuvers as it does an unconscious kinesthetics beyond the predictability of opposing players.

A technological singularity includes the concept of an intelligence explosion, a term coined in 1965 by I. J. Good.  Although technological progress has been accelerating, it has been limited by the basic intelligence of the human brain, which has not, according to Paul R. Ehrlich, changed significantly for millennia.

However with the increasing power of computers and other technologies, it might eventually be possible to build a machine that is more intelligent than humanity. If superhuman intelligences were invented, either through the amplification of human intelligence or artificial intelligence, it would bring to bear greater problem-solving and inventive skills than humans, then it could design a yet more capable machine, or re-write its source code to become more intelligent. This more capable machine then could design a machine of even greater capability.

Here I’m about to get into even more trouble. Think of the majority of football laboring under the limitations of the human brain. Where football has “29,384 rules about who can and can’t do what on which plays,” soccer imposes as few legal limits and stoppages as possible. What Barca has done (though they are not the only one) has built a machine in La Masia, their youth program, that could design an even greater machine. The school regularly turns out the key cogs in Barca’s engine, so fantastically programmed to produce the same game regardless of the lineup.  This contrast is more prevalent pro football than in college, where you have the odd Mike Leach, whose practices reveal the same machine manufacturing as La Masia.

These iterations could accelerate, leading to recursive self improvement, potentially allowing enormous qualitative change before any upper limits imposed by the laws of physics or theoretical computation set in.

A terse response to the idea that Barca’s dominance could be waning. Anyone who’s watched them this season would quickly admit their flow has been a pace or two off. And yet they continue to win the big games, often with different, younger players, and sometimes (as yesterday) with an unfamiliar style.

The term “technological singularity” reflects the idea that such change may happen suddenly, and that it is difficult to predict how such a new world would operate.

It is unclear whether an intelligence explosion of this kind would be beneficial or harmful, or even an existential threat, as the issue has not been dealt with by most artificial general intelligence researchers, although the topic of friendly artificial intelligence is investigated by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity Institute.

Think of American football as a computer program at its most basic: a series of if:then algebraic equations: X(down) x Y(distance) / Z(time left in the game) =  A(the correct play call). Coaches carry the menu of all possible play calls, using a laminated possibility chart to obfuscate which one of n plays they’re calling at that particular instant. Whereas soccer, Barca especially, is singularity: the entire tactical knowledge of centuries converges to create its own possibilities, outcomes unimaginable, unpredictable, and wondrous.

Jan 18 2012
Leave a comment
Drinking Man's Thinking Guide

The Drinking Man’s Guide To Thinking

All these fancypants mens magazines run segments trying teach impressionable boys who’ve yet to make a decision on their own how to drink more thoughtfully/ responsibly/ fashionably/ manlyly. Instead of that, every St. Thursday’s Eve we’re gonna learn y’all drunkards how to think. Here we go…

Translating foreign-language authors into English is always tricky, especially with poetry, especially with centuries-old Chinese which had no past or future tense. But oh man, if this is wrong, I don’t want to know what’s right:

Surely, if heaven didn’t love wine.

Li Po

there would be no Wine Star in heaven,

and if earth didn’t love wine, surely

there would be no Wine Spring on earth.

Heaven and earth have always loved wine,

so how could loving win shame heaven?

I hear clear wine called enlightenment,

and they say murky wine is like wisdom:

once you drink enlightenment and wisdom,

why go searching for gods and immortals?

Three cups and I’ve plumbed the great Way,

a jarful and I’ve merged with occurrence

appearing of itself. Wine’s view is lived:

you can’t preach doctrine to the sober.

Li Po was a great poet and an even greater consumer of sake. When summoned on government business to immortalize an imperial outing, dude showed up dead drunk and tossed off a series of classics when revived. According to legend, you couldn’t find Li Po sober, if you could find him outside of a wine house at all. His titles certainly read that way: “Waiting for Wine that Doesn’t Come,” “Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon,” Drinking in the Mountains With a Recluse,” “Drunk on T’ung-Kuan Mountain, a Quatrain,” and “Written on the Wall While Drunk at Wang’s House North of the Han River.” As his friend and fellow poet Tu Fu described:

As for Li Po, give him a jugful,

He will write one hundred poems.

He drowses in a wine shop

On a city-street of Chang-an;

And though his sovereign calls

Will not board the imperial barge.

“Please your Majesty,” says he,

“I am a god of wine.”

And he went out like a true “Banished Immortal:” while drunk on a boat, he fell into a river trying to embrace the moon’s reflection and drowned. So sit yourself down with a bottle of chilled sake and enjoy the work of a dude that could out-write you, out-drink you, and out-think you.

Jan 12 2012
Leave a comment
Blogroll, Friday Morning Dump

The Great Friday Hangover Brain Dump

A forum to flush out the week’s ideas after a strong cup of coffee…

It’s pure joy to get a postscript to the 2011 season that doesn’t sound like an internment, and Holly’s SI piece rightfully finds the wonder in college football. This may be myopic, but her appreciation of and search for the unknown in football is precisely what I was talking about when comparing the sport to international club soccer. I think both our points stand: the beauty of sporting events and seasons is not knowing how they will end; although I personally think a soccer match leaves a bit more to the imagination.

The Economist had a fantastic blurb that dovetails nicely with our Drinking Man’s Thinking Guide series. The crux:

Men were to consume large quantities of alcohol in keeping with conventions of excess. Yet they were also supposed to remain in control of their faculties, bantering and displaying wit. Students and would-be lawyers formed drinking societies, where they learned the social–and drinking–skills required of gentlemen.

If there’s anything this blog would love to learn you, it’s how to effectively drink, banter, and be a gentleman. The practice of law I’ll leave to the side.

Look, the college football season ending fucking sucks. It all seems over too quickly. It’s hard to imagine what we could’ve done to enjoy it more, but it already feels like we took it for granted. Want to be distracted, and not by the seedy world of recruiting? Pick a soccer team. I would never presume to tell you which team, but I can certainly recommend some people who will make the transition enjoyable:

The Run of Play; Dirty Tackle; The Free Beer Movement; The Spoiler; The Reducer; and, for style, The Beautiful Gear.

Speaking of style, this Vanity Fair piece justifiably skewers recent fashion and design for its retro sensibilities. While I agree that this is a reaction to the mach speed of technological advances, I don’t share the author’s optimism that anything will change – those advances will only come faster and furiouser, so it stands to reason that in five years, we’ll all be dressed like Star Trek yeomen. I wondered if this also applied to sports, both aesthetically in uniforms and functionally in tactics. And then I got distracted by this & this.

I’m going to have a longer post that tangentially addresses the hypocrisy of banning players from selling their own jerseys while the school does the same, but I’ll address the feeling when your chosen school does it: UGH.

Happy Weekend, Y’all. 

Jan 11 2012
Leave a comment
Drinking Man's Thinking Guide

The Drinking Man’s Guide To Thinking

All these fancypants mens magazines run segments trying teach impressionable boys who’ve yet to make a decision on their own how to drink more thoughtfully/responsibly/fashionably/manlyly. Instead of that, every St. Thursday’s Eve we’re gonna learn y’all drunkards how to think. Here we go…

Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect.

That’s Mark Twain, speaking about English As She Is Spoke, the classic tale of creating an English phrasebook for visiting Portugese students by combining a Portugese-to-French phrasebook and a French-to-English dictionary. The final contents have almost become cliche:

Moer-vos-hei ou moel-o-hei as pancadas: I should kill-you to the blows with a stick.

As espigas sao mui compridas: The ears are too length.

And the essential “For Embarking One’s Self:” Zombo d’elles; o meu navio e armado em guerra, tenho equipagem vigilante e animosa, e as municoes nao me faltao: I jest of them; my vessel is armed in man of war, i have a vigilant and courageous equipage, and the ammunitions don’t want me its.

I will take Uncle Mark’s advice and not attempt to add too much to the absurdity  of this book. But I will say that reading this sober will make you feel drunk. And reading it drunk will make you feel euphoric. A final anecdote, English spoke as only:

A tavern-keeper not had fail to tell theirs boys, spoken of those which drank at home since ou will understand:— “Those gentlemen to sing in chorus, give them the less quality’s wine.

Jan 04 2012
Leave a comment
Drinking Man's Thinking Guide

The Drinking Man’s Guide To Thinking

All these fancypants mens magazines run segments trying teach impressionable boys who’ve yet to make a decision on their own how to drink more thoughtfully/responsibly/fashionably/manlyly. Instead of that, every St. Thursday’s Eve we’re gonna learn y’all drunkards how to think. Here we go…

Rough. And. Tough.For our inaugural week, we going BIG. While you’re boozing this weekend, pick up James Joyce’s Ulysses. You may know this book as either (a) a completely inscrutable text, (b) a great running reference in Tom Robbins’s Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, (c) a literary snob’s bludgeon in any argument, or (d) all of the above. But hear me out…

First, this thing looks badfuckingass on your shelf. Just read that name: ULYSSES. Sounds old and tough and surly all at the same time. Plus, the text has heft to it, so it’s handy in a fight. These combined with the instant name recognition mean that when a visitor spies this hunk of modernist classic on the bedside table, they’ve been adequately warned of your physical and mental prowess.

Second, this baby was declared obscene until a US District Court ruled that it wasn’t pornographic, and therefore couldn’t be obscene. See, I’m partial to the Modern Library edition, which has the court’s opinion right up front. You want to know Judge John M. Woolsey’s deciding factor on whether to ban the book or not? Here you go:

…I checked my impressions with two friends of mine who in my opinion answered to the above stated requirement for my regeant [a person with average sex instincts]. These literary assessors…were called on separately, and neither knew that I was consulting the other, They are men whose opinion on literature and on life I value most highly. They had both read “Ulysses”, and, of course were unconnected with this cause. Without letting either of my assessors know what my decision was, I gave to each of them the legal definition of obscene and asked each whether in his opinion “Ulysses” was obscene under that definition. I was interested to find that they both agreed with my opinion: that reading “Ulysses” in its entirety, as a book must be read on such a test as this, did not tend to excite sexual impulses or lustful thoughts but that its net effect on them was only that of a somewhat tragic and very powerful commentary on the inner lives of men and women.

BOOM. That’s the fucking law, folks, in 5 easy steps. Step 1: Form a loose opinion on your own. Step 2: Quiz a couple buddies on their sex lives, see if they’re “average.” (Note: What do you think the odds are that (a) these friends would admit to anything perverse, (b) this judge will find his own friends’ sex lives perverse, even if they admit it, and (c) then say so in a published opinion?) Step 3: Hand these non-lawyer pals a legal definition (no doubt elucidated by you). Step 4: Ask if that fits the facts at hand. (Note: What do you think the odds are that either of these friends would admit to reading an obscene book to a friend who also happens to be a judge they had to know was rendering an opinion on the matter?) Step 5: If they agree with you (shocking, I know, the same opinion shared amongst friends), you are correct in your ruling – throw that shit right there in the opinion. The system WORKS, people.

Third, and here’s the real beauty of the book – it’s fucking intoxicating. And I mean that seriously and in the drinking context. Crack this baby open at the end of your boozing shift, and it will take you straight to Dreamland. Not in the “boring you to sleep” way – in the “language is bending your mind into magnificent sleep” way. It’s mesmerizing. So what if you have no fucking clue what is going on in the story; just a few sentences in, it FEELS great just to be reading it. There’s a lullaby cadence that will ring some primordial bell in your lizard brain. You may not know what you’re reading or why you like it, but that won’t matter one whit.

So there you have it – a boozy book written by a hard-drinking Irishman that would’ve been banned for being pornographic had not a couple of the Good Judge Woolsey’s friends stepped in on its behalf. Drink a flagon, turn a page, and you’ll be thinking in no time.

Dec 30 2011
Leave a comment
Uncategorized

When To Watch The World Burn

College football remains unique in just how suddenly and immediately a season can end. And by season I mean all those hopes and dreams and goals, so lovingly nurtured, fed, raised, coddled, and berated; so carefully drawn along those endless spring and summer days. Every reason you smiled in March, dreaming of September and October, praying for January. In college football your future can end with a quickness unlike any other sport. Unlike pro football, with divisional home-and-homes, wildcards, and home-field advantages. Unlike club soccer, with 3 or 4 or 5 trophies all in orbit simultaneously. And certainly unlike pro basketball, hockey, and baseball, with seemingly interminable seasons surpassed only by seemingly interminable postseasons. 1 game, 1 loss, and that’s it. (With the odd exception here and there and in this year’s title game.)

And I’m not talking about the non-expectations of bottom-dwelling teams. Yes, hope springs eternal. But real hope – tangible hope – grows at the foot of a stair. Losing season to a bowl. Bowl to conference title game. Conference title game to conference championship. BCS bowl to BCS title bowl. Each step, each rung, cradles a true hope, and true hope in college football is a fragile fucking thing.

Because in college football all your would-be banners can burn early. You’re left with embers while the rest of the universe marches on, passing you and your team by, parading their vivid pageantry in gleeful solipsism. And as soon as your season is in tatters you want chaos to rain down on that carnival around you. Sure you love to see your rivals lose, but that exists regardless of your own team’s success. What I’m talking about is wishing nothing but mayhem on every other team playing. Once the life of your season is snuffed out, you want everyone else’s to end as well – for the entire ceremony to descend into the same madness you now inhabit and will inhabit you until the last game.

For Florida State fans, this bloodlust peaked after the Wake Forest loss. Losing to Oklahoma and Clemson was rough, but only the most diehard loons really thought a national title was possible this season, and surely Clemson would Clemson the Noles into the ACC title game. And that was the real, tangible, true hope: an ACC title. Wake Forest burned that down with a quickness, and for the rest of the season I rooted death (in the form of losses) on just about every team, at just about every turn. I wasn’t looking for anything like a logical progression or ending to the season. I wanted to watch the world burn. Even beating down two rivals (at least the 120 minutes of game time) was anti-cathartic. I don’t apologize to Alabama, Stanford, Oklahoma State, or Boise fans for cheering their losses just as I don’t expect an apology when other fans clearly delight in Florida State’s. That’s the nature of fandom: our team can only succeed at others’ failure; and if our team fails, well, those others can sure as hell fail along with us.

And yet, just as decidedly as a college football season can end before the season even matures, the next can start before this one ends. Plenty games have yet to be played, but as soon as the clock ran out on Notre Dame last night, the seeds of next season’s hopes, dreams, and expectations were firmly in the ground. I have no doubt these expectations will outgrow reality. There’s no helping that. But there’s no denying that they exist again, and I can exist with them, and we can march together for the next 8 months eyeing that horizon. Because we’re undefeated again, and we’ve got everything to play for.

← Older posts
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.